The State of the World

29 Sept 2011

I’ve been trying to use Twitter as a less trivial way to communicate with large numbers of people who share my interests. I consulted the help menu and understand that to generate followers I have to be active. The messages I send out have to be noticed. The problem is I’m not willing to waste time pointing out the obvious, the vaguely amusing or the slightly surprising, and I’m too cynical to get involved in every-day political debate.

So, here is something important and controversial. PLEASE SHOW ME I’M WRONG!

I’ve become more and more convinced that our whole way of life is based on a myth; that concepts like “growth” and “progress” are built on sand. I’ve thought a lot about this in the last few years and I now believe that what is happening to our world is really quite simple. I’ve taken some of the basic principles of evolution (which seem to me to be only controversial if you are a creationist) and set them out as “rules”:

RULE 1

Go forth and multiply

This is how a living organism is defined – a structure that can reproduce itself

Evolution lays an iron rule on all of us living things:

“The whole purpose of your life is to pass on your genes. Success is measured by how many copies of your genes you can pass on.”

RULE 2

To multiply you need resources

 – food and a suitable breeding environment. We all need food; fish need water, birds somewhere to nest, humans need shelter, grass needs soil etc.

RULE 3

The food of one species is the offspring of another.

Every form of life is predated by another  - even top predators have diseases.

RULE 4

When breeding and predation are in balance population numbers remain stable

RULE 5

With a good breeding environment, few predators and plenty of food (abundant resources) any species is bound to increase its numbers.

It can’t avoid doing so. Every form of life is programmed to multiply in response to the resources available to them and to the pressure of predation.

RULE 6

It takes longer to breed than it does to eat

Breeding rate responds to the food supply, so at the end of the process there are more mouths than food to feed them. Some species – mice for example – can respond very quickly. If predation is removed and food is plentiful, numbers can double and double again in weeks, until within a very short time numbers reach plague proportions and use up all the food. Then the population crashes.

So what’s this got to do with humans?

We’ve got the better of most of the organisms that try to live off us – from sabre tooth tigers to smallpox. We have plenty of food and we have family planning. Whenever resources start drying up we find new ones, and we’ve been doing this for centuries.

My thesis is that the pattern is still there – we are clever enough to keep postponing the crash point but not clever enough to prevent it. What we have achieved with amazing ingenuity is to find more and more ways to cheat the process.  By exploiting coal and oil we’ve vastly extended the capacity of the planet to sustain human life and as a consequence human numbers have reached plague proportions.

It is this plague of humans which is threatening to destroy not just us but all life on earth.

The big question now is:

Can human ingenuity reverse the process before it’s too late?

Do Red Kites protect lambs from crows?

24 September

The village I live in, Cilycwm,  has one pub called the Neuadd Fawr Arms. (Neuadd Fawr means big hall and refers to the old hall up the road which is now in ruins) I got talking to two of our neighbours there, both fringe members of the farming community and both interested in birds and wildlife. The topic was crows, and Aled asserted that the Red Kites are beneficial to the farmers because they keep the crows off the lambs. Crows and Ravens are well know for their gruesome habit of helping themselves to those tasty morsels, the eyes, whenever a sheep or lamb  is down or helpless.

What's interesting about this is that Kites are not very powerful predators - they do not have strong talons or powerful beaks, whereas Ravens have virtual pickaxes on their heads. Indeed it is claimed that the kites need foxes or Ravens to open up the carcase before they can feed, so it wouldn't seem to make much sense to chase the corvids away.

Not only do the top corvids have powerful beaks, but Ravens are around 1.3 kilos in weight, the same as the largest female kite - males weighing in at around 1kilo. Kites do have a bigger wingspan though, and if you go to a kite feeding station it is clear that they are the top scavenger - the crows and magpies don't get a look in. (I've not seen Ravens at a feeding station, perhaps because they are naturally more afraid of humans).

If Aled is right, then the only thing I can think of to account for this is that kites look like eagles, and we can assume that, like most birds, corvids will have a natural fear of eagles.

When inertia is the biggest risk

13 Sept 2011

On Sunday afternoon I said goodbye to the Small Nations Festival. (www.smallnations.co.uk) It’s not the first time but I really cannot imagine a situation in which it won’t be the last. There were at least 6 people there I had never seen before;  much of what was said I could not hear, and I no longer care who is involved.  Apart from the hearing, these are actually  positives.  I had made a resolution not to speak, but did so only to say that the reason for my resolution (not to speak) was that I believed the most important thing for the festival now was to change.  It’s good that new people are coming in. It may be frustrating that so many of the new ideas cropping up are things we’ve tried before, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t work in a different environment. The last two years following the old pattern but with a much reduced budget have not worked and the deficit has increased.

The message that “business as usual” is actually the most risky strategy is a difficult one for many people to take on board. We see this most acutely in the majority view on climate change. Our way of life is based on modifications to things we’ve been doing for centuries; it has the weight of history behind it – why change when a few more modifications could put us back on track?

Last week we visited the only old school friend I have kept in regular touch with. He's having a hard time. Half a lifetime of prevarication has left him with no proper provision for retirement and a mortgage. He looked after both his parents during their last days but was shocked to find that his mother had changed her will in his sister's favour leaving him with half what he expected and not enough to pay off the mortgage. The recession has reduced his income to the extent that he is losing hundreds of pounds a month so his legacy is being eaten away. 

It's a mess and calls for a properly thought out strategy for getting out of it, but my friend is hampered by grief, anger and, worst of all, indecision. I tried to persuade him that a possibly risky way of making money was less risky than doing nothing. I offered all the help and advice I could think of but it doesn't seem to have had any impact. I am really worried for him.

Hayle - individual freedom vs pubic good

2 September 2011

The Towans are the collective name for the dunes which run north from the Hayle estuary, and each section has a different name - Riviere, Mexico, Phillack, Upton etc. Strange names for a strange place. Hayle the town has some things in common with the Welsh post-industiral towns - the ugliness of its housing for example. It is a place of great importance in the history of the industrial revolution, but unlike Ironbridge which has created a world class museum, the best Hayle could manage so far has been to convert part of the magnificent old Harvey's Foundry into flats. The huge harbour has been a half emply building site for at least the four or five years we have been coming to St Ives in September.

This is probably because Hayle also has some world class beaches, and wetlands. The huge and wonderful estuary is the warmest in Britain and owned by the RSPB who have done quite a good job of protecting it from development. The Towans or dunes (same word as twyn in Welsh?) are mostly owned by the National Trust who presumably have had to grapple with the thorny issue of caravans and chalets. The area behind where we are staying looks not unlike a badly planned prison camp. It is full of a haphazard collection of concrete bunglows, most of which look like the more utilitarian type of public toilet. These are in marked contrast to the few older, mainly wooden beach chalets that have somehow been allowed to survive. Most of these have been build and maintained with love if not with much skill.

The thorny issue is to what extent should the owners and custodians of these precious places try to fulfill the huge demand for places to stay on holiday. The big question is "what is the point of conserving these places if people can't enjoy them?" To the dedicated conservationist the answer is clear - to save our natural heritage - but most of us want a chance to stay for a week or two in a comfortable few rooms with a nice view. A typically British response to this shown a few hundred yards further away from the town from us. There a row of 20 identical new chalet caravans are lined up end-on to the sea. In each case the living area has a picture window looking out over one of the best views in Britain - the Hayle estuary with St. Ives on the other side. Behind the front row and offset from it is another row, each one of which has a partial view, and behind them a third row with a little slice of view. I assume there is a scale of rental charges according the the view available. The beach is a short walk away and by this means hundreds of people are able to have a good holiday, the Council gets its tax and the owners make money and provide some jobs. The beach is so big it seldom gets really crowded, so it sounds like a win-win situation.

The problem is that, in order to provide these holiday makers with their graded views, those looking the other way have their view spoilt by ugly metal caravans.

We had a couple of days in the Gower last week, and walked towards the Worms Head from Rhossili village. Rhossili beach is rightly protected as an international heritage site (or some such terminology).  Despite this there is a row of caravans right in the middle of it, and clearly visible from most of the beach. Why do we allow this to happen? Why should the pleasure of a few dozen families be allowed to detract from that of the millions who visit the beach over the years?

It's the same problem as public music, noisy sports, crowded roads, and any kind of recreation which has a detrimental impact on the public at large. How far do we restrict individual freedom for the greater good.